Groove by OptimizeCX vs. Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk

Groove is great for people who are wanting to provide accountability and organization for teams across your business. It is suited well for an organization that has many email requests coming in every day, because you can assign tickets to specific team members. It would not be suited for an organization that utilizes more phone support, than email support

It's a great helpdesk solution - we currently have five years of data within it, roughly 25,000 tickets. The older edition is a great inventory and software license tracking tool. It is easy for users to use the interface and submit tickets and requests on the web, and its email integration is solid. The new version is a below-average system monitoring tool, only giving up/down status and a few other metrics.

Incentivized

• Creates Tickets when someone emails in or you can create a ticket within the groove system.
• They have great reports on response times and the average amount of time it took for a ticket to close. You can even see individuals average response times as well as specific teams.
• We use their Knowledge Base which is a great tool for creating FAQ and sending people to that.

Incentivized

• It helps to multitask, even on the go with the mobile App.
• We can customize to meet your needs with automated responses, notifications, and templates.
• Detailed reports allow managers to keep track [of] and analyze data.
• Allows for a database to store notes helpful for future tickets.

Incentivized

• Better Follow-up by customer success team
• More customization within their major features to fit both, large and small sales teams, alike
• Their site goes down fairly often

Incentivized

• I have always wanted a way to redirect a support request into another IS bin, such as a development task.
• It's possible to extract the data from the Spiceworks database, but it would be helpful if the process to do so were easier.
• Improved ability to customize the system generated emails to improve the formatting and company branding.

Incentivized

Spiceworks is a free tool, so there would be no hesitation if we are required to upgrade it. We have installed Spiceworks on a dedicated server with more than enough resources to get the most from this tool, so we will have this running in our department for years to come.

Incentivized

It's well organized, but slow.

Spiceworks is user friendly and easy to set up. It can be customized to suit your needs. If there are any problems, you can go to the community forums for support and be in contact with many IT Pros, as well as the Spiceworks support staff and development teams who are always happy to help users out

Incentivized

We use it both locally on our own server so up time is decided by us and we also use the hosted help desk. We have never had an outage of that.

Incentivized

I'm giving them a 3 for the really great support they gave for general questions. They also have a good knowledge base. I'm giving them only a 3 though because of my last customer service when I need a billing resolution. I was very disappointed in how they handled that. I also find it very bad practice to send out ONE email notice that they were raising my rate three times as much at the end of the month. When I was with Desk.com, I had numerous emails over months letting me know their billing plans were changing. Even worse than refusing to refund me the difference was that they just stopped responding to me.

Spiceworks has been working out of the box, and some of the basic customizations have been successful with just our internal staff handling. We don't have any other issues with the tool. It provides us with the inventory information we want in a quick and concise report in a variety of formats for our team.

Incentivized

If you can spin up a VM to run it on, you'll thank yourself later. If you have remote sites, set up a local server (or dedicated computer) at each site and set them up as remote collectors for the main site. You'll save time and bandwidth

Incentivized

We also use Trello for project management. I have used both systems and we like Groove because it allows for our clients to contact us via email. They do not have to go to a ticket submission page, they can just email us directly and it will create a ticket. Groove also provides analytics on how long it takes to respond to tickets

EGroupware UI is clunky and hard to use, Jira is great but the pricing is expensive in comparison with spice works that has a free version and you can test it out properly before buying and make a correct decision based on your business plan and company objectives with the right software.

Incentivized

• We wasted a lot of time setting up the product before we discovered a lot of features listed on the website aren't ready for public use

• Positive - Allow organizations to implement structured Help Desk procedures.
• Positive - IT can begin to quantify their tickets and uncover needs within the organization.
• Positive - IT can develop a solid roadmap with [the] management of future needs, equipment refresh schedules, etc.
• Positive - IT can pinpoint employees who may need extra training or updated equipment based on historical ticketing data.

Incentivized